I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoyed Chuck Klosterman’s 'Billy Sim', an essay from his collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (1). The piece is about The Sims, a computer game where players design characters, drop them into a virtual house, and do everyday things like cook dinner, take out the trash, or pay bills. It is, as he put it, the game you would play if you weren’t playing a computer game, a game designed to help us video gamers 'escape to where you already are'.
One of the strange aspects of this game is the lack of external goals, objectives, or missions. It differs from most games I’ve played where every positive actions seems to unlock a new prize or lead to a shiny reward. In The Sims, you just play, and that’s it, and you can keep playing if you want to. When you no longer wish to play, you stop.
For the past few years, my brother and I have gotten the chance to boot up The Sims on PlayStation2 during our returns home for the holidays. We create our characters, try to draw a virtual line down the middle of the virtual house, and play the game ‘head-to-head’ while finishing the leftover beer and food from the day. Whenever I describe this tradition to someone else, I’m met with the same befuddled question - wait, how do you play The Sims against each other? And my answer is always the same – well, you can’t really play against each other, but we do, and it always ends in a tie (2).
Like all questions, though, I sense this question about how to play The Sims ‘head-to-head’ is asked with one of two responses in mind: a five-second answer or a five-minute answer. Most of the time, when I give my glib response about how 'no one can win, really' before steering the conversation on to talk about families, homes, and all the other holiday stuff, what I'm really doing is assuming my conversation partner wants the shorter answer.
Occasionally, I realize the stage is available for a much longer answer. In these moments, I delightfully rub my palms together with self-important excitement before I launch into what I consider The Real Answer to the question. To summarize quickly, my response works out to something like this: well, the real question here is why people assume a game simulating real-life would have a winning condition.
I was reminded of these exchanges when I was reviewing my notes for Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen. A major theme of the work is the importance of discarding all the external goals, ideologies, or belief systems that influence behaviors or cause anxieties. As these concerns slip away, the individual stops worrying about the past or the future and instead becomes ready to serve the needs of the present moment.
I’ve become pretty good at playing The Sims over the years and I note a similar progression in my own playing style. It is entirely possible to play the game with the outside measuring stick in mind. Promotions, for example, have strictly defined skills a character must learn before the virtual boss will consider a raise. These skills are easier to gain if a character is well-rested, well-fed, and etc, all goals reached more swiftly with the purchase of the right mattress, the right stove, and so on. Some careers require a minimum number of friends and these, too, require time and effort (like talking to Mortimer, the local voyeur). But to buy these skill-developing or weirdo-impressing things, a character must earn more money, and so the promotions come into play again, and those require skills...
At some point, it becomes perfectly possible to get stuck in a sort of Sim-rut. The character reaches a certain career level and, needing to make more friends AND develop new skills AND fix the leaky sink AND yell at Mortimer AND wash the dishes AND ten other things just to be considered for a promotion, runs out of time for a basic thing like lunch. Work performance suffers as a result because Hungry Sims apparently suck at admin and the much-needed promotion moves a little further out of reach. So then those post-work hours get devoted to working on things like eating lunch and the character runs out of time to make more friends OR develop new skills OR fix the leaky sink OR yell at Mortimer…if the TV breaks or a burglar shows up or the toilet clogs, look out.
It is at this point where a quote Klosterman includes in his essay comes into play. Materialism, says Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, is 'the red herring in the game'. It seems like the idea of the game is to make a little money and buy a few things and make more money and buy more things and eventually make all the money and buy all the things. But the experienced player learns that all this stuff just adds to the stress of daily living: the stress of repairing the broken electronic, the stress of cleaning the table, the stress of replacing the burnt out bulb, it all just makes the game impossible to play when the goal is to buy a hot tub.
And at the heart of all this stress is the drive to accumulate, manage, and maintain all this stuff. And in The Sims – just like I suspect is the case with real life – there is no actual item available to make anyone happier. So buying the next thing doesn't solve anything. In fact, it just adds to the stress because the new automatic dishwasher is another thing to manage and, if it breaks, another crisis to respond to.
So reader, you may be wondering, if the only actual gameplay option is a 'red herring', then what is there to do in the game? I concede the point – this is a very good question. The first step to the answer is a backward one, away from the incessant questions about daily living, the questions like who is going to fix the TV or when are we going to buy a good shower or can we afford the automatically flushing toilet, because these questions hide an underlying insatiability that makes playing the game so much harder.
Without these questions, The Shiny New Thing loses its magical power. And what is this power?
It's the strange ability to make everyone forget that after a week or so of The New Shiny Thing, life always returns back to normal.
It's the power to make us consumers experience the stress of maintaining and repairing The Next New Shiny Thing, to make us experience this stress until we want The Next Newer Shinier Thing, yet somehow not making this stressful enough to make us conclude that the problem isn't the Shininess, it's the Thing itself.
It's magic, really, perhaps a dark magic, that no one acknowledges how owning all these gizmos and gadgets means borrowing from our budgets or our schedules or our relationships to take care of our
possessions.
It just goes
around and around and around every time these things act up, break down, or simply fall apart before reaching their final resting places at the local junkyard. I found The Sims became a much easier game to play when I focused on meeting my basic needs, finding time to hang out with friends and family, and using my remaining time and energy to build my skills. These are all means to the same ends described above. A well-fed, highly skilled, and socially supported Sim is often the first in line for a Sim Promotion. But approaching the game in this way does not result in the same striving for goods and services seen when the focus is on optimizing for promotions or saving up funds to buy the next great refrigerator.
It works more like how Beck describes it in Everyday Zen – I look around at the game environment, pay close attention to what is going on, and simply do what needs to be done next. There is no room for a belief system like ‘the kitchen must be clean’. Of course, if cleaning the kitchen serves the needs of the Sim family, it gets cleaned. If cleaning it serves no need, the kitchen doesn’t get cleaned. Reader, in this game, it’s as simple as that.
Footnotes / Google 101 / how to break a tie
1. Four times, technically.
Reader, you can find the results if you follow this link to my google search using the site name and the search term 'the sims'.
2. Well, except the one time…
One time, my brother became disillusioned with his progress and announced he wished to kill himself (editor’s note: kill himself in the game). We thought about this statement and agreed at the time that I was, somehow, the winner.
A few days later, though, I thought about it again. I didn’t really win, I decided. It was more like he lost. This became the official ruling for a while.
But now, with the wisdom of my limitless hindsight, I am again thinking about the situation differently. My brother was courageous enough to admit he needed help (editor’s note: needed help in the game). In life, this is really akin to winning. So maybe, really, I lost the round in question.
